Exporting to OrCAD PADS-PCB

[Yoshin]

Please help us we’re desperate.

We have a schematic designed in KiCAD that we’re trying to pass off to the layout designers, but we found out that our board designers only use OrCAD. Is there any, any way to generate a compatible netlist? The built-in OrCAD PCB2 exporter does not work. I have scoured old forums from more than a decade ago, trying out obscure plugins to try and get something to work, but to no avail. I’ve also tried using Altium as a middleware but it just crashes mid-way though. Before anyone asks, no it is not an option for the layout designers to use KiCAD, and no it is not a (practical) option to remake it by hand as it is a ~570 component board.

The only forum posts I can find on this topic are outdated/unresolved, so if anyone knows how to solve this, even partway, you’d be my hero.

[eelik]

@Yoshin

The built-in OrCAD PCB2 exporter does not work.

What does it mean it “does not work”?

[paulvdh]

Netlists tend to be readable ascii files.
If you can get your hands on a netlist file generated by OrcAd, you can analyze the differences between it, and what KiCad Generates.

I half expected the OrcAd netlist generator to be a python script, but it is not, as I found:

paul@medion:~$ locate orcad
/home/ ...  /projects/linux/kicad-source-mirror/eeschema/netlist_exporters/netlist_exporter_orcadpcb2.cpp
/home ... /projects/linux/kicad-source-mirror/eeschema/netlist_exporters/netlist_exporter_orcadpcb2.h

The file itself is only 150 lines of code and it uses fprintf() to write to a file.
So if you can figure out why it is not accepted by your Orcad it would be relatively easy to fix, but it does need a recompile.

You could even write a bug report for it, but the difficult part is to figure out what the expected output format would be.

If you can figure out the differences, an intermediate fix could be to modify the output of OrcadPCB2 in a text editor or with a python script.

Apparently it’s also possible lo load a plugin for generating netlist output:

I have never used this myself and do not know how it works, but maybe others have written a plugin for your Orcad dialect.

[Yoshin]

I have tried using it, and sending the generated file to our layout designers, and they cannot open it in OrCAD. It also doesn’t appear to use the correct PADS-PCB format when opened in a text editor